300: How many hits his very first blog post on FiveThirtyEight.com, which he established in 2008, received.

50: Number of states (plus the District of Columbia) for which Silver accurately predicted the winner in the 2012 U.S. presidential election.

34: Age

20%: The percentage of traffic that The New Republic reported Mr. Silver alone was responsible for driving to the New York Times website on the Monday before Election Day.

19: How many taquerias he'd frequent within a five-mile perimeter (naturally, he counted) while living in Wicker Park in Chicago. At that time, he maintained a lesser-known and far-less-scientific blog dubbed "The Burrito Bracket," which pitted neighborhood Mexican fare against each other based on factors such as meat texture, garnishes on the plate, and the way each burrito triggered the five senses.

8: Where on The New York Times Best Sellers list his book "The Signal and the Noise" landed for all non-fiction e-books after its first week in print.

4: According to LinkedIn, number of years he worked as a consultant at accounting firm KPMG before becoming a statistician, economic consultant and blogger.

1: The number of states in the 2008 general election that he didn't accurately predict; that year Mr. Obama beat John McCain in Indiana by 0.9%.

.249 Lifetime batting average of Bill Pecota, journeyman MLB player, after whom Silver named the system he created for forecasting and tracking baseball players' performance. That system is what originally won Silver recognition for his number-crunching ability. PECOTA is used as an acronym that stands for Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm.